Sailboat racing pretty much looks like a pretty oil painting unless, I suppose, you’re on one of the boats. I wouldn’t know. David Pogue would. The New York Times tech columnist got that experience for “NOVA: Making Stuff: Faster,” the latest installment in a series that will continue in the next few weeks with “Wilder,” “Colder” and “Safer.”

For “Faster,” which airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday (Oct. 16) on WYES, Pogue came aboard the 72-foot catamaran Oracle Team USA would use to win the recent America’s Cup. Financed by tech bazillionaire Larry Ellison, the boat is almost not. Its sail is really a wing. At racing speed, its hulls lift out of the water as the craft rides on undersea hydrofoils.

It shares more with an aircraft than something you could fish from, though maybe not at 50 m.p.h. The footage in this segment of the show is awesome. Somewhat less visually engrossing but nonetheless cool is a later sequence about the science of loading passenger butts into airplane seats. Electric cars and fast bikes also get some screen time, but the pictures of that big sci-fi cat on San Francisco Bay are worth whatever you paid for your new TV.

During the Summer TV Tour in Hollywood, staged before the racing began, Pogue played devil’s advocate with Dirk Kramer, design executive for the Oracle team.

“I’ve actually heard people say, ‘The America’s Cup is no longer a sailing race. That thing is an aircraft,’” Pogue said. “What do you say to that?”

“Well, it’s never been just a sailing race,” Kramer said. “I call it a race of management. You have got to manage your resources, your development, your human performances and all of that. And it all culminates into a sailboat race, but that’s really only the final test of your success.

“So there are still very much elements of human performance at stake, there’s no question about that. But the human performance is also the performance of the team, the designers, the engineers, the builders of the boats to make them a bit faster than the other guys’.”

And they would.

“It is an unbelievable experience to ride on this thing,” Pogue said. “The entire boat rises, like, 10 or 12 feet off of the sea, and the entire thing is riding on only two points. There’s a foil under the water about 6 feet wide, and the rudder, and that’s it. Both hulls are completely out of the water, and it’s very magic carpet-like.”

The footage of and talk about Ellison’s $500 million bay bomber raised a question, which I’ll paraphrase liberally: The rich guy’s super-quick dinghy is cool and all, but where’s my personal jetpack and flying car?

“There actually are several companies right now with roadable aircraft or flying cars,” said panelist Chris Gerdes, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, aeronautics, and astronautics at Stanford. “They may not be exactly at the price point of most consumers, but you can certainly make that. There certainly have been a few attempts at the jetpack, which works for a few feet at any rate.

“None of these things are impossible. They may not be things that we can develop at a price that anybody would want to want to buy them. There are, of course, some things that physics will say you simply cannot do, perpetual motion machines and the like, but I think there’s very little limit. I think a lot of times we put limits on what we think is possible and don’t simply step out and say, ‘Well, if there’s nothing physics says preventing us from doing that, why can’t we?’”

Since time is money, “… Faster” finds Pogue exploring new developments in efficiency as well as speed. He competes with a UPS messenger using a route optimization program to deliver packages — and loses. He tries out the lightning-fast download speed available in Kansas City, where connections are 200 times faster than average, thanks to fiber optic connections that have replaced copper wire. And, using a real 737 and volunteers, he tests two airplane-boarding theories to find out which plan is more efficient. “The results are surprising, deeply satisfying, and one thing I can promise you is that both methods whooped the butts of the current back‑of‑the‑plane‑to‑the‑front method,” he says.

In “Making Stuff Faster,” Mr. Pogue wants to find out how much we can tweak physiology and engineering to move humans and machines even faster. He investigates everything from lightning-fast electric muscle cars to ultra-sleek sailboats to ultra-fast cameras and quantum teleportation.

Mr. Pogue meets with Dr. Peter Weyand, Associate Professor of Applied Physiology and Biomechanics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas’s SMU Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development. Dr. Weyand, introduced as a professor of speed, explains how we can be faster. His lab at SMU (a high-tech facility equipped with superfast cameras) helps him on his singular mission: to make humans faster. Dr. Weyand’s work has led him to believe that the force of steps when we run is the key to human speed and, in a unique experiment, and he demonstrates to NOVA viewers how a complete and utter amateur like David Pogue can have off significant amounts of time off the clock by adjusting the way he runs. NOVA also explores important questions: Is it possible to go too fast? Have we hit a point where innovation outpaces our human ability to keep up?

Watch a preview, then keep reading.

Press Kit Theater

Soap-on-a-rope from “Raising Hope,” a tech juice-booster from “Almost Human” and “The Governor’s Wife” make their Press Kit Theater debuts. Tap the yap!